W. G. Griswold, J. J. Yuan, Y. Kato, ``Exploiting the Map Metaphor in a Tool for Software Evolution'', Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Software Engineering, Toronto, IEEE, March, 2001.

Copyright 2001 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2001), March 2001, Toronto, Canada. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE.

Abstract

Software maintenance and evolution are the dominant activities in the software lifecycle. Modularization can separate design decisions and allow them to be independently evolved, but modularization often breaks down and complicated global changes are required. Tool support can reduce the costs of these unfortunate changes, but current tools are limited in their ability to manage information for large-scale software evolution. In this paper we argue that the map metaphor can serve as an organizing principle for the design of effective tools for performing global software changes. We describe the design of Aspect Browser, developed around the map metaphor, and discuss a case study of removing a feature from a 500,000 line program written in Fortran and C.